Connection rules

If your company uses Microsoft Exchange 2010 or Office 365, you can use Mobility Manager to manage Exchange connection rules that allow you to configure what devices can connect to an Exchange mailbox. The Microsoft Exchange 2007 server environment doesn't support connection rules. Connection rules are used to allow or deny connections for specific device types.

By default, Mobility Manager does not manage connection rules, so if you have connection rules configured on the Exchange server already, they are not modified. However, if you configure connection rules through Mobility Manager, those rules override any rules configured on the Exchange server.

NOTE: Connection rules are applied to any device that connects to the Exchange 2010 server, regardless of whether it has an agent installed or not.

Since the Apple mobile device model list is fairly small, it's easy to identify the devices you're interested in managing:

•iOS

•iPad

•iPhone

Android is more complicated because there are so many manufacturers providing Android devices. With Android devices, you'll need to pay more attention to the much larger variety of device types that exist in the Android ecosystem.

Fortunately, it's fairly easy to find out a device's type. When a user tries accessing their Exchange mailbox from a mobile device that is blocked by a connection rule, that user receives an email with information about why the mobile device was denied access. Included in that email is the mobile device's device type.

Administrators can use the information from this email to add the blocked device type to an exception list if they want to allow that device model access.

If mobile devices have already connected to your Exchange server, and you want to continue to allow those devices regardless of whether they meet the connection rule criteria or not, use the grandfather option.